The BA (Hons) Musical Theatre Performance programme is designed to enable you to develop the skills, attributes and knowledge necessary for a career as a creative entrepreneur and artist (singer-actor-dancer) in the Musical Theatre industry.
Key Features:
- Support and guide your development in preparation for a career in the professional musical theatre industry
- Empower students to operate as creative entrepreneurs
- Foster the development of graduates able to make and perform musical theatre works that reflect, interrogate and/or enrich society
- Enable you to value, have confidence in, articulate and execute your own artistic choices
- Support your development as an independent learner able to recognise and realise your own intellectual, creative and practical potential
- Facilitate your learning from professional musical theatre practitioners
- Enable you to understand the range of creative roles within musical theatre and how these might inform future employability
- Nurture your collaborative and leadership skills.
Our Graduate Diploma Programme is ideal for instrumentalists, vocalists and composers who have gained a degree and want to deepen their skills before undertaking postgraduate study.
During the programme you will hone your skills as an artist through one‑to-one Principal Study lessons, group tuition and experience playing as a soloist and in ensembles. We will encourage you to develop skills for lifelong learning by building working relationships with other students.
This is a graduate programme aimed at students considering entry to postgraduate study at a conservatoire or university who do not currently meet the required standard. The programme enhances musicianship skills to bring students to the level needed to enter a postgraduate music degree.
We also offer an International Graduate Diploma in Music and English for international students who wish to improve their English language skills alongside their musicianship skills. You can find out more on the International Graduate Diploma: Music and English course page.
The MA in Music Education and Performance is designed for any student wishing to pursue an active career as both a professional musician and a teacher or educator. It aims to equip you with the necessary musical skills, insight and experience required by the contemporary profession in its widest sense, with a focus on the artist in educational settings, from instrumental and/or vocal teaching to workshop leading.
This programme can be taken on a full-time intensive basis for four terms (15 months, Sept 2021 – Dec 2022) or on a part-time basis over seven terms (27 months, Sept 2021 – Dec 2023). The programme is auditioned and accepts students in composition and classical or jazz performance. Teacher-artists in other genres will be more suited to the Teaching Musician Programme, which shares some modules with the MA MEP.
Delivered in conjunction with our partner organisations: Siobhan Davies Dance and Independent Dance, the Dance Professional Practice enables experienced practitioners to develop their artistic practice in a stimulating environment of intellectual and creative inquiry.
We support mid-career artists to:
- reflect on their body of professional experience and its role in their ongoing learning
- engage in intensive studio-based experiences with significant artists and a skilled peer group
- deepen their own practice as performers/makers
- develop their understanding of a range of research methodologies within the arts
and pursue their own area of artistic interest.
The Master of Music (MMus) programme is designed for students wishing to be professional musicians: performers and composers. It aims to equip students with the necessary musical skills, insight and and experience required by the contemporary profession in its widest sense but with a focus on the Western Classical and Jazz traditions.
Our named Awards: Collaborative Piano, Composition, Ensemble Artistry, Jazz, Performance and Performer-Composer each offer comprehensive specialist training pathways. (Find out more in Course Details).
Key Features
- Provides advanced musical training at postgraduate level which encourages the demonstration of individual musical talent and scholarship.
- Enables musicians of proven ability, and with the potential for further training, to advance and refine their skills and specialism/s and deepen their professional expertise.
- Acknowledges the significance of musical context, highlighting the relationship of music to wider artistic, historical, philosophical, cultural and/or social practices, issues and/or phenomena.
- Cultivates musicians who have the ability to work in a variety of complex musical groupings and to exercise leadership in professional practice.
- Creates an environment which encourages risk and nurtures creativity and innovation, reflecting cutting-edge thinking within the profession.
- Produces enterprising, entrepreneurial musicians equipped both for today’s diverse, internationalised and ever-changing music profession.
- Explores the application of artistic research within a clearly defined are of music.
Acting pathway - course units include:
• Acting technique
• Vocal skills
• National Theatre Connections tour
• Drama improvisation
• Musical theatre
• Singing
• Physical theatre
• Classical theatre
• Contemporary theatre
• Movement skills
• Stage combat
• Radio techniques.
Dance pathway - course units include:
• Ballet technique
• Contemporary dance
• Urban
• Jazz
• Dance improvisation and choreography
• Group and individual repertoire
• Musical theatre
• Acting technique
• Vocal skills.
If you love dance and the performing arts, this course is for you. You will develop skills as a performer and will gain the qualifications necessary to enter higher education or work in the industry.
• Acting techniques
• Movement skills
• Musical theatre
• Devising projects
• Singing
• Dance
• Production arts skills
• Performance workshops all designed to help improve your skills, confidence and performance ability.
This one year course is for anyone with and an interest in learning more about the Performing Arts. Whilst experience is useful, we welcome anyone with an enthusiasm and passion for the subject area.
As a student on the MA/MFA Creative Producing programme at Central, you will:
- Real-world creative producing opportunities to develop knowledge and skills
- Networking through placements with leading theatre and arts organisations, masterclasses and industry mentors
- Student-led collaboration with writers, actors and designers on other Central MA/MFA courses
What is a Creative Producer?
The entrepreneurially skilled and culturally literate producer works in dialogue with artists to create performances and festivals, run venues and companies, manage projects, raise funds and investment, and negotiate commissions.
Central graduates have become successful producers, among them Sir Cameron Mackintosh, a name synonymous with Britain’s global pre-eminence in musical theatre, and David Jubb, whose pioneering work at Battersea Arts Centre characterises the vibrancy and originality of London’s contemporary fringe, or ‘off West End’ scene.
The courses offer real-world creative producing opportunities within Central’s production calendar and with extensive industry partners, enabling you to build on your existing practice. These skills are in ever-increasing demand in a competitive production environment.
You will undertake masterclasses in producing with key industry leaders and innovators and take an active role in the organisation of events, productions and projects, underpinned by a solid critical understanding of the cultural industries and creative producing skills, relevant theory and current research in the performance field.
While learning, you will also gain a career head start by building a vital network of industry and peer contacts.
Our research culture at Central is one of enquiry, innovation and experimentation where staff and students alike are engaged with new and pioneering ideas and practices, and seek to understand these within a wider field of performance and cultural production. A student’s eventual PhD submission may be a single and sustained written thesis, or it may feature practice-based projects alongside a written component to the thesis.
We believe that research into our disciplines often involves exploration in, and through, the media with which we are concerned. Central’s academic staff are expert in drawing connections between exploratory practice and advanced conceptualising, process and product, making and articulating. We also have a strong tradition of text-based academic scholarship in drama, theatre and performance.
